The present description relates generally to the field of generating and managing purchase orders. More particularly, the present description relates to a method and system for entering purchase order data.
The retail business can require that certain purchase orders be processed in a very short amount of time, while other purchase orders must be placed in advance of the desired delivery. For example, changes in current trends in the fashion industry may require that inventory be increased on short notice. Additionally, fashion articles may require ordering well in advance of delivery, in some cases six months or more in advance. For certain aspects of the fashion industry, items may be required to be ordered one or more seasons in advance. An advantageous purchase order system must accommodate this variation in lead times of the ordered items without unnecessarily tying up funds.
Further, tracking inventory and budgets for seasonal items can be important to the profitability of a business. For example, identifying a particularly fast selling item and ordering additional quantities to arrive on time and within a prescribed budget may increase the profitability of a retail location. Accordingly, it is important for a business to carefully plan and schedule purchasing orders for retail products and services to ensure on-time procurement or scheduling within budget constraints. Optimizing the smooth flow of the procurement process increases an enterprise's efficiency and competitiveness and determines its success.
As part of the procurement process, retail businesses and service providers often need to manually enter large amounts of data into the purchase order system. For example, in order to generate a purchase order, a significant amount of detailed information may need to be entered or determined for each line item in the purchase order. Some of this information may have been previously entered into the purchase order system in different locations, and may need to be consolidated into a single document in order to determine certain parameters, such as quantities, dates, and prices, before generating the purchase order. Manually entering or retrieving this data may become highly repetitive, may further require frequent changes between data entry devices (e.g., switching between keyboard and mouse), and may require a large number of user input commands. There is need for a method and system for purchase order data entry that may provide more efficient manual entry of purchase order data.